THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLEREntertainment Weekly's 20 New Books to Read in September Nylon's 12 Great New Books To Read This September Newsweek's Best Books to Read in September 2018Paste's...

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLEREntertainment Weekly's 20 New Books to Read in September Nylon's 12 Great New Books To Read This September Newsweek's Best Books to Read in September 2018Paste's...

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THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLEREntertainment Weekly's 20 New Books to Read in SeptemberNylon's 12 Great New Books To Read This SeptemberNewsweek's Best Books to Read in September 2018Paste's 12 Best Novels of 2018Library Journal's Best Debut Novels of 2018BookPage's Most Anticipated Fall 2018 FictionIn his much-anticipated debut novel, Hank Green—cocreator of Crash Course, Vlogbrothers, and SciShow—spins a sweeping, cinematic tale about a young woman who becomes an overnight celebrity before realizing she's part of something bigger, and stranger, than anyone could have possibly imagined.

The Carls just appeared.

Roaming through New York City at three a.m., twenty-three-year-old April May stumbles across a giant sculpture. Delighted by its appearance and craftsmanship—like a ten-foot-tall Transformer wearing a suit of samurai armor—April and her friend, Andy, make a video with it, which Andy uploads to YouTube. The next day, April wakes up to a viral video and a new life. News quickly spreads that there are Carls in dozens of cities around the world—from Beijing to Buenos Aires—and April, as their first documentarian, finds herself at the center of an intense international media spotlight.

Seizing the opportunity to make her mark on the world, April now has to deal with the consequences her new particular brand of fame has on her relationships, her safety, and her own identity. And all eyes are on April to figure out not just what the Carls are, but what they want from us.

Compulsively entertaining and powerfully relevant, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing grapples with big themes, including how the social internet is changing fame, rhetoric, and radicalization; how our culture deals with fear and uncertainty; and how vilification and adoration spring for the same dehumanization that follows a life in the public eye. The beginning of an exciting fiction career, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is a bold and insightful novel of now.

Excerpts-

From the bookCHAPTER ONE

Look, I am aware that you're here for an epic tale of intrigue and mystery and adventure and near death and actual death, but in order to get to that (unless you want to skip to chapter 13—I'm not your boss), you're going to have to deal with the fact that I, April May, in addition to being one of the most important things that has ever happened to the human race, am also a woman in her twenties who has made some mistakes. I am in the wonderful position of having you by the short hairs. I have the story, and so I get to tell it to you the way I want. That means you get to understand me, not just my story, so don't be surprised if there's some drama. I'm going to attempt to come at this account honestly, but I'll also admit to a significant pro-me bias. If you get anything out of this, ideally it won't be you being more or less on one side or the other, but simply understanding that I am (or at least was) human.

And I was very much feeling only human as I dragged my tired ass down 23rd Street at 2:45 a.m. after working a sixteen-hour day at a start-up that (thanks to an aggressively shitty contract I signed) will remain nameless. Going to art school might seem like a terrible financial decision, but really that's only true if you have to take out gobs and gobs of student loans to fund your hoity-toity education. Of course, I had done exactly that. My parents were successful, running a business providing equipment to small and medium-sized dairy farms. Like, the little things you hook up to cows to get the milk out, they sold and distributed them. It was good business, good enough that I wouldn't have had a lot of debt if I'd gone to a state school. But I did not do that. I had loans. Lots. So, after jumping from major to major (advertising, fine art, photography, illustration) and finally settling on the mundane (but at least useful) BFA in design, I took the first job that would keep me in New York and out of my old bedroom in my parents' house in Northern California.

And that was a job at a doomed start-up funded by the endless well of rich people who can only dream the most boring dream a rich person can dream: being even more rich. Of course, working at a start-up means that you're part of the "family," and so when things go wrong, or when deadlines fly past, or when an investor has a hissy fit, or just because, you don't get out of work until three in the morning. Which, honestly, I hated. I hated it because the company's time- management app was a dumb idea and didn't actually help people, I hated it because I knew I was just doing it for money, and I hated it because they asked the staff to treat it like their whole life rather than like a day job, which meant I didn't have any time to spare to work on personal projects.

BUT!

I was actually using my degree doing actual graphic design and getting paid enough to afford rent less than one year out of school. My work environment was close to technically criminal and I paid half of my income to sleep in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment, but I was making it work.

I fibbed just now. My bed was in the living room, but I mostly slept in the bedroom—Maya's room. We weren't living together, we were roommates, and April-from-the-past would want me to be very clear about that. What's the difference between those two things? Well, mostly that we weren't dating before we moved in together. Hooking up with your roommate is convenient, but it is also a little confusing when you lived together through much of college. Before finally hooking up and have now been a couple for more than a year.

If you happen to already live together, when...

Reviews-

May 1, 2018

Crash Course channel cocreator Green debuts with twentyish April May making a video that shows her scrambling about a huge, transformer-like sculpture, the first of many worldwide. What do they mean, and how can April cope with the international attention her video brings?

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2018A young graphic artist inspires worldwide hysteria when she accidentally makes first contact with an alien.Famous multimedia wunderkind Green is brother to that John Green, so no pressure or anything on his debut novel. Luckily, he applies wit, affection, and cultural intelligence to a comic sci-fi novel suitable for adults and mature teens. It's endearing how fully he occupies his narrator, a 20-something bi artist named April May who is wasting her youth slaving at a Manhattan startup. On her way home late one night, April encounters an armored humanoid figure, which turns out to be alien in nature--"And I don't mean alien like 'weird, ' " she says. She phones her videographer friend Andy Skampt, who posts on YouTube a funny introduction to the robot she dubs Carl. April's life is turned upside down when the video goes massively viral and immovable Carls appear in cities around the world. After they discover a complex riddle involving the Queen song "Don't Stop Me Now," the mystery becomes a quest for April; Andy; April's roommate/kind-of-sort-of girlfriend, Maya; a scientist named Miranda; and April's new assistant, Robin, to figure out what the Carls are doing here. "None of us older than twenty-five years old, cruising down Santa Monica Boulevard, planning our press strategy for the announcement of First Contact with a space alien," says April. April and her friends are amiable goofballs and drawn genuinely for their age and time. Meanwhile, the story bobs along on adolescent humor and otherworldly phenomena seeded with very real threats, not least among them a professional hater named Peter Petrawicki and his feral followers. Green is clearly interested in how social media moves the needle on our culture, and he uses April's fame, choices, and moral quandaries to reflect on the rending of social fabric. Fortunately, this entertaining ride isn't over yet, as a cliffhanger ending makes clear.A fun, contemporary adventure that cares about who we are as humans, especially when faced with remarkable events.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 9, 2018The younger Vlogbrother (John Green is the other) draws on his passion for science and his experience as a “Tier 3” celebrity (“You’ll probably trend on Twitter if you die”) for a comic debut that combines science fiction and mystery with philosophical musings about the perils of internet fame. His main character, the unfortunately named April May, is a recent art-school grad who happens upon a 10-foot-tall robotic sculpture in the darkened streets of Lower Manhattan. Entranced, she summons Andy, a classmate with a video camera, and the two introduce the figure they dub Carl to the world via YouTube. April May becomes a celebrity but soon discovers that dozens of Carls have appeared in cities across the globe. As she and her friends search for an explanation, she struggles with her newfound addiction to fame and the damage it causes to her most important relationships. April May’s narration, which doesn’t fully work, is both self-effacing and contradictory: she bemoans how much she enjoys fame while cynically crafting a message stressing community, which she determines will best resonate with her fans, thus growing her fame. Though the ending is disappointing (it appears to be setting up a sequel), fans of Green’s YouTube channel will find his humor and perceptiveness intact in this novel.

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Penguin Publishing Group

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